IGCSE Maths Revision Strategies How Can Parents Help
As parents of a child appearing for IGCSE, your world seesaws between stress, anxiety, nervousness on one hand and attempts to ease this process for your child by hovering over them and basically acting like helicopter parents. Some parents tend to oscillate between being very strict and taking their child’s phone away while other parents try to over-compensate by often feeding their ward too much!
Remember, you know your child better than anyone. How can you help and support during this time? What hints and tips have worked in the past? How can you support your child to do the best they can? As parents, you will be struggling with all these questions. It can be a stressful time to know what to do and say.
In this article, we are going to try and outline some more practical ways in which you can support your child during this stressful period.
1. Timetable: Individual exam timetables are usually issued anytime from three months before the start of the exam season. Its best to go through the exam timetable carefully together with your child. This will help to see what lies ahead and plan accordingly.
2. Revision Schedule: Creating a revision schedule with your child is very important. Creating a revision timetable can help your child to organise their time navigate their way through the exam season. It is recommended that children revise for about 5-7 hours a day. Do factor in when your child will start studying, and when they will end. Allow at least 45 minutes for lunch. Breaks are very important and need to be scheduled in as well. This should be mutually discussed. Given the number of subjects that need to be covered, it might be good to set out how many of them can be revised in a day. And of course , children must have a day off!
3.Flash Cards: Making flash cards or revision cards, are very effective. This is often overlooked as a revision strategy. They are essentially postcards with information written on them. The reason they work so well is that the child has to create them. This means taking pieces of related information from a book, digesting it and then writing it onto a cards. This way, by reading the information the child hits the seeing learning input. By writing the card, the child achieves the learning input, as they write it. Then, when they are tested, they are speaking the answer, thus hitting the hearing learning input. It is best not to buy ready-made revision cards because most of the learning happens by creating one’s own. Using someone else’s flash cards ineffective and the whole point of this strategy is essentially lost. Instead, it’s best to buy a pack of blank revision cards and a set of pens and highlighters, and make your own.
Check out this interesting video on flashcards:
4. Another essential tool that parents can help with is to motivate your child to create mind maps. life. Mind maps are an essential tool in business and for kids at school. This is because they allow you to kind of empty your thoughts onto a page. Writing lists means that you have to write the things and order them at the same time.
Tony Buzan founded mind mapping and this is what he says about it:
5. Exam Techniques: Exam techniques are another important part of revision strategies. What do exam techniques actually mean? If it is a Maths exam, then the child needs to know how many types of questions there are, and their marking. This helps a student to then adopt an approach that best suits their ability. For example, the 2 mark questions probably need the lowest capability, and the 6 mark questions, the highest capability. If Maths is a weaker subject for your child, a good exam technique could be to tackle the 2, 3, and 4 mark questions first, and then if there is time leftover, to tackle the 5 and 6 mark questions. Encourage your child to ask the teacher for an exam technique for their subject.
6. Study Groups: Studying in groups does allow students to share their different thoughts with one another. This leads to a better learning process, since brainstorming generates new ideas. Therefore, students in a group have the opportunity to learn the same thing but with different perspectives. Open discussion enhances thinking skills and will give access to others information and as a result, broadens your mind. But there are cons also. Some students work better at night time, others work better during the day. When students study in a group, the priority is finding a time that works for everyone, and not necessarily finding a time that is most effective for studying. On the other hand, studying alone allows students the freedom to choose when they want to study and for how long. Therefore, help your ward figure out if being part of a study group works really works for him/her.
7. Testing: Constant testing is an important part of your ward’s prep for the IGCSE. Testing helps students to identify their strengths and weaknesses. They get to know where their preparation actually stands. Students understand where further improvement is required and can revise thoroughly to cope with their weak areas. This also means they now have specific queries with which to approach the teacher for further clarifications. As a parent you could help in the testing process. Testing your child is a very effective exam revision strategy because it does ‘force’ your child to dig into their memory and recall what they have learnt. Testing can significantly increase your ward’s retention of information.
8. Staying Focused: For today’s students, staying focused is one of the biggest challenges. Social media is addictive and distracting and having a smart phone means, that your child is getting notification pings constantly while studying. The best thing would be to keep the phone away from your child during revision times. But that is easier said than done. So, the other option is to let your child have the phone but have it on silent mode. I recently found a very interesting app online. It is called – ‘Forest- Stay Focused.’ It is a great motivation tool. In this app, if you stay on the same screen and don’t flip onto any other social media screen, your tree will grow. And you can create an entire forest. The more you stay on the screen , the more your forest grows. As a parent, you could download the app as well and maybe challenge your ward to who build an entire forest first. This app is a great solution to the problem of staying focused. You can go to the app by clicking on the image below:
9. Discipline: As a parent you would have noticed the lack of discipline, once the child is away from school. Hence, instilling discipline as parent may be your biggest and most challenging revision strategy of them all. The freedom children want away from the rigid structure of school can be a problem. For the first time in over ten years, they are left to their own devices. Therefore, as a parent you need to set some clear ground rules early on regarding study hours and use of social media and other entertainment avenues. Of course, you will need to combine praise and supportive actions along with your rules to make the discipline effective.
10. Online support: As a parent you may always be torn between whether or not to have online tutors for IGCSE Maths or other subjects. You know your student best. If you feel that he is weak in Maths, then there is no shame in getting your ward the support needed. IGCSE Maths topics are a mixture of some easy and some really difficult concepts and it is natural for a student to feel intimidated by some topics rather than others. Sign up for a personalised one-to-one free demo sessions on www.wizert.com